US and Iraqi forces clashed with insurgents in a battle that escalated from gunfire to artillery barrages near the violence-wracked city of Baquba early yesterday, killing 13 Iraqi militants, the US military said.
Iraqi forces and US troops suffered no casualties from the fighting in Buhriz, about 60km north of Baghdad.
Qayser Hameed, an emergency worker at Baquba General Hospital, said two dead Iraqis -- a police officer and a civilian -- and six injured civilians were brought to the hospital. Some of the casualties had bullet wounds, while others had been hit by shrapnel, he said. It was unclear if the two killed in the hospital were in addition to the 13 dead reported by the military.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Yasir Ahmed Ismail, the dead police officer, was killed inside his house when a mortar hit nearby, according to police Lieutenant Mohammed Adel.
The battle came amid a surge of violence across Iraq that killed a US soldier near the city of Beiji, a former Baghdad official and his son in the capital, two policemen south of Baghdad and five people in a string of attacks in the northern city of Kirkuk.
US and Iraqi National Guard forces entered an area of palm groves south of Buhriz early yesterday and destroyed a suspected staging ground used by insurgents for attacks on coalition and Iraqi troops, said Major Neal O'Brien, spokesman for the 1st Infantry Division.
During the raid, insurgents attacked Iraqi National Guard forces with small arms and the Iraqi troops chased the attackers into the southern section of the town, O'Brien said.
At about 11am, the Iraqi fighters began firing mortars indiscriminately, and the US responded with artillery fire, he said.
TV footage recorded several loud explosions, apparently from artillery and mortar fire, booming through Buhriz and bullets ricocheting off building and shop walls, sending residents running for cover. A US Apache helicopter hovered overhead.
Local Iraqi fighters, some wearing white robes and red scarves over their faces but most clad in black clothing and ski masks, roamed the streets carrying rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Buhriz, a former stronghold of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, has been the scene of previous clashes between coalition forces and Iraqi insurgents.
The clashes on Saturday killed 13 insurgents, and the US military confiscated an array of weapons, including three 120mm mortar rounds, one 155mm artillery round and three rocket-propelled grenade launchers, O'Brien said.
Meanwhile, violence surged across the country.
One US soldier was killed and another injured when a roadside bomb exploded as they were escorting a fuel convoy, the military said yesterday. The explosion on Saturday afternoon occurred outside the city of Beiji, about 145km south of the northern city of Mosul, US Army spokesman Master Sergeant Robert Powell said.
In the Baghdad suburb of al-Dora, gunmen killed Brigadier Khaled Dawoud, the former head of Baghdad's Nahyia district under Saddam Hussein, and his son in a drive-by shooting yesterday, police lieutenant Mustafa Abdullah al-Dulaimi said. Dawoud's son was not identified.
The car was raked with bullet holes, its windows shattered and its interior covered in blood.
Gunmen also killed two policemen yesterday morning as they traveled to work at the Mahmoudiya police station about 40km south of Baghdad, police lieutenant Alla Hussein said. The attackers escaped.
In the northern city of Kirkuk, where residents include Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen, a spate of violence killed five people, police said.
An Iraqi policeman was slain by unknown gunmen in a passing car at about 8:30am yesterday while waiting for a ride home after his shift guarding a pipeline, said Colonel Sarhad Qadir of the Kirkuk police.
Assailants sprayed gunfire at the house of a Kurdish family in a predominantly Arab area in southern Kirkuk, killing a woman and two of her sons and injuring her daughter, Qadir said.
In another attack, an unknown gunman killed Shirwan Jilal, a fighter with the pro-US Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, in a drive-by shooting on Saturday night as he walked home, Qadir said.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has